 Aloha and welcome to Stan the Energy Man here on Think Tech, Kauai, I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and can you believe it, this is the last Friday in 2018, gonna start a new year next week, I don't know where 2018 went but it sure went by quick and I think 2019 is gonna go by even faster so hold on to your hats. Anyway, we've got a great show today, like last week we talked a little bit about battery storage on the grid and our guest today, I've actually heard him speak several times but most recently I heard him about six weeks ago at an event here in Honolulu sponsored by the German Chamber of Commerce and the local council general from Germany and they put on a program that was focused around hydrogen and energy storage specifically but focused a little bit on hydrogen and we had a great chance to listen to some great briefings and our guest today put on one of the best, it's Dr. Matthew Dewberry from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and I almost, I'm afraid I'm overexposing him because he's been on a couple of times with Mitch Ewing from H&EI, they worked together so Mitch had him first, he got first dibs on Dr. Matt but he's a really great resource to have here in the state especially as we talk about the more sophisticated or the more current batteries that are popular which is lithium, that's a specialty. So we'll try and demystify some of the lithium aspects and just talk about pluses and minuses of batteries in general, how they work, things that you want to do so glad to have a year and I know you've already told probably Mitch's audience how you got to Hawaii and how you got to work at UH doing battery stuff but tell my audience how you got here. Sure, so as you can tell from my accent, I'm French, I did all my studies in France. By formation I'm a ceramist engineer so I have two master degree, one in ceramic engineering and one in material science, I then did my PhD in France and that's when I started working on lithium metal batteries and after that I really wanted to start working on commercial system and start working on larger scale. So I came here 2005, working for H&E, I was a postdoc and then I slowly rose and now I'm faculty over there, we're doing mostly the diagnosis and prognosis of commercial cells and that's because we really want to help equal, obvious people in the state that wants to put large battery packs to understand how to use their battery better and what to do, what not to do with those kind of batteries. My guest last Friday was Ryan Wubbins from Burns & McDonald's, they're a large engineering firm out of St. Louis and he's one of their electrical engineers and we're talking about scaling up batteries and could you just talk a little bit about some of the challenges or some of the benefits to scaling lithium technology up to multi-megawatt, even gigawatt scale? Well the biggest issue is that all the, when you build lithium-ion batteries, they're all going to be slightly different and that's just the manufacturing and of course the really high quality battery are much closer together than the cheap batteries but even the really expensive one, they're all a little bit different. So it's not a big deal in a cell phone, just have one, but when you start to pack thousands of them, if not more, then you need to find a way to take into account all those small variations because they're going to influence a lot the performance of your assembly but even more importantly they're going to influence or you're going to monitor it because lithium-ion batteries, as you know, there is a risk in term of safety if you don't operate them properly and usually that risk increases when you have more and more cells because you have more and more parameters and getting harder and harder to make sure they all stay in sync and they all do exactly what you want them to do. So the main difficulty is to control them and monitor those cell to cell variations. We use some lithium cobalt technology in our vehicles so we have some 14 kilowatt hour battery packs that we put in there and to my surprise, probably not to yours, the cells are actually pretty small there, like two C cells are typical alkaline batteries, two C cells taught on top of each other and all set up. They also have cooling so that's another thing that's put in there. Is that part of the controls that you're talking about? Because battery behavior is going to be really dependent on the temperature and what you really don't want is having batteries at different temperatures and that's because if they are different temperatures, some are going to give more capacity than others and so they're going to get out of sync much, much, much faster. The reason why they tend to use those really small batteries is because they are mass produced. I mean we're making billions of them every year so their quality is really good and they're really close to each other. Some manufacturers, like I think the Nissan Leaf, is much larger batteries and then you run into issues because you make far less of them and so you take the risk of they're going to be a little bit more different than if you take two Bavos batteries, they're called 18650s, they're 1.8 centimeter by 650. Tesla made the choice to use only, yeah, but that's a standard for a computer and all these kinds of batteries. Tesla made the choice to use those, I mean the Tesla Model S varies 10,000 of them or something like that. So that's the choice of having something that's mass produced so you know the quality is going to be there and the chance of getting a less performing battery is pretty small. How about cost and just the logic of using batteries for huge, either long duration or for high, high voltages or high power requirements? I think for power it makes sense and the new generation of batteries are extremely powerful. For load shifting and all this kind of aspect, that's a bit more debatable depending on how much energy you want to shift and batteries, in the reality I think batteries don't store much energy. You compare that to hydrogen, I'm not going to talk to you about that, but batteries don't store much energy at all so it's really really good for power, it's really really efficient, but for long duration that might not be the best energy storage and large capacity. It all depends on the scale you want, for us if we want to store for the whole grid one gigawatt hour of energy, battery is probably not a good solution for that. So let's take off on that. So one gigawatt doesn't make much sense. When you think about Hawaii, Hiko, I looked on their website, they generate roughly a gigawatt of power plus or minus 250 megawatts or whatever, and different times of day they generate more or less depending on what the usage of the requirement is. But let's just say just for round numbers, they have one gigawatt requirement all day long. That's 24 gigawatt hours of storage potentially when we don't have coal or other base power. If you had to use only solar, wind or renewables, especially intermittent renewables and you have to store power, you're going to need way more than one gigawatt of storage. You're going to need probably 5, 10, maybe even up to 20 depending on having reserves for several days rather than just overnight. Yeah, I mean you can do an easy calculation, the BSS we have on the grid right now, they have one truck trader, but it's fairly small but still it's pretty big. I think the best one are probably around 500 megawatt hour. So to get to one gigawatt hour you need 2,000 of them. That's start to be a lot of batteries and that's just for, as you say, for one hour for the grid. So if you want two or three days reserve for days like today where we're not going to see the sun much, then it's too much. I don't think, to me that's not the solution I think. It's really good to have them for power and for instant access to electricity, but for long-term storage, especially if we want 3, 4, 5, a week of reserve, I don't think batteries are the right solution for the task. Well, let's talk a little bit about, you know, batteries are amazing things to me. And I had the one slide I showed when you briefed in that couple of weeks ago. My only slide just showed basic capacitors up to pumped hydrogens and stuff and the different batteries in between. So you had at the bottom end you had supercapacitors that are really powerful for really short duration. Then you move into the metal batteries that are, you know, a little bit longer duration and can still do a good power, power push or smooth power. And then you get into flow batteries and then above that you get into long duration batteries. But wonder, what is your outlook for the future? You know, I mean, I hear people say that lithium batteries are going to get cheaper when we go into higher scales of production, when we have economy of scale in production. But does that take into account where we get the materials and all the different materials that go into a lithium battery, at least by the current designs? So, you know, some folks have told me that cobalt is actually the limiting component in current lithium technology because there's less cobalt around than there is even lithium. And then we get those materials from countries mostly outside the United States. So we get back into that we don't control our own energy, major components of our energy system. Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. So on your first point, the power ability, the main difference between lithium batteries and the other kind of batteries is the electrolytes. And the voltage of a lithium ion battery is three point something volts. Any other battery that's based on the water electrolyte cannot go over two volts. Because then water split and we're just making hydrogen and oxygen. That's why lithium ion batteries are so powerful compared to the rest is that they don't use water as an electrolyte. The big drawback is that the organic electrolyte we use is really flammable and leads to almost thermal runaway winds. So that's if we want safer batteries, we need a water based electrolyte but then we cannot go over two volts to some degree. There are some solutions to override that. But to answer on the cost, I think the cost might still go down a little bit. But you're right, the more battery we produce, the more we're going to be limited by essentially the cobalt. A lithium is fairly abundant. It's just really, really small. So to get to the lithium, we need to remove everything else first. But yeah, cobalt is coming from Congo mainly, which is not a country that's known to be really nice to these people. So yeah, cobalt is going to be a concern. But there are several battery chemistries for lithium that doesn't use any cobalt. OK. Well, we talked a little bit before the show about the lithium ferrous phosphate technology. Can you explain how that's different from lithium cobalt? Sure. So what people don't realize is that in a lithium ion battery name, it can be a large difference in terms of the materials they use on both the positive and the negative electrode. So most batteries, 99. something percent, have a graphite as the negative electrode. And on the positive, there are five or six families of compounds that people use. One big family is called the layered oxide, and that's the one that contains cobalt. Those are great because they give you a lot of power, and the voltage is really high, around 4.2 or around that range. You have the manganese oxide. It's also really good, they have power. So if the cobalt is high energy, the manganese oxide powers around 4 volts. And you have another family that's the LIFEPO4 lithium-iron phosphate. So the drawback of that one is that the voltage is much lower. Voltage is only around 3.6 volts. Also, it has less capacity. If you look at the cobalt oxide, it's around 160 milliamp hour per gram, lithium-iron phosphate is at 120. So it's less capacity when you put them together and less voltage. So that's the drawback. The pros of lithium-iron phosphate are pretty significant. It's extremely high power. Most things you can put as much current as you want and it's going to work. The other huge benefit is that it's not as sensible to thermal runaway than the cobalt batteries. The thermal runaway, it's a really simple process. It's just that the electrolytes start to kind of boil in a way. The electrolytes start to decompose around 80-something degrees. And then the temperature slowly rises because that reaction produces heat. So when it starts, it's not going to stop because it produces heat. And usually in a cobalt-based battery, when the temperature reaches 300, it's going to strip the oxygen from the cobalt oxide. And that's when the temperature rises really, really rapidly and the pressure and all of that. In the lithium-iron phosphate, the oxygen is with the phosphate. So it's a much stronger chemical bind. So you don't really strip the oxygen from it. And so usually those cells don't go into thermal runaway at all. And I've seen videos of full battery packs of LFP cells for lithium-iron phosphate. You can put them on fire and nothing's going to happen. I mean, they're going to burn, but they're not going to burst into flame like the cobalt-based batteries. And when you have one of those fires, what happens when you put water on it? People still debate that. I think now for the firefighters, they still recommend to put a lot of water on that. Just because what you need really is to cool the battery as much as possible. And I think for your viewers, a really good tip. The great thing, if I can say about thermal runaway, is that at the beginning, that's a really, really, really slow process. OK. So... If you can interrupt it then... Yeah, and for what I do in my lab is when we have a battery that gets hot, the first thing we do is we, of course, unplug it and we wait an hour. If an hour later the battery cools down, you're fine. It's not going to explode. If an hour later the battery is still hot, then it's started the thermal runaway process and that's when you need to act about it. OK. So a good tip to know if your battery runs really, really hot, if you remove it, let it rest, it gets cold, you're fine. It's not going to explode. If it stays hot, then you need to act on it. And I would recommend to put it in sand or something like that. OK, I'll cool it down. Well, sand is great because it's going to act like a sponge if the battery leaks. It's not going to cool it down, but it's going to act like a sponge and sand melts at 2,000 degrees. So you're sure nothing is going to get out of there. OK. So if you look, if you go in my lab, we have big trash can full of sand just in case. OK, well, that's a great advice. We're going to go to break now and come back and talk to Dr. Burberry about some more technologies that he's working with in lithium batteries. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech. Come around every Tuesday at 2 PM with John, David, Ann, and me. We're talking about history, history lens, right, John? Exactly. Seeing current events through the lens of the past. Absolutely. See you next time. OK, Jay, thanks. Hey, welcome back to Standard Energy Man here on my lunch hour, as usual. And we've got a great guest today talking mostly above my head, but I'm trying to hang with him. I've got Dr. Matthew. I want to say Michel, because most French guys I know are called Michel, but Matthew Dubury from the university's H&EI. He's a specialist in lithium batteries, and we're talking to him a little bit about just some of the different think characteristics of lithium batteries and the different kinds of lithium batteries and what makes them different. So I think it's pretty interesting, but this kind of circles back around to what we're talking about earlier, where you can hook batteries up in parallel or in series, and with one, you actually build your voltage. And the other one, you keep the same voltage, but you build more capacity. Would that be a fair word? Maybe you have a right word for it. I'm sure I don't. Explain that relationship on how you hook up batteries to either increase the voltage or keep the voltage in. So by nature, a battery has a given voltage. And you may be surprised, the lead-acid battery is 2 volts. Most people think the lead-acid battery is 12 volts. But no, that's 2 volts. And in your car battery, you have at least six that are connected in series to make those 12 volts. So if you want 900-volt battery, you're going to have to stack them in series to increase the voltage. But then, you cannot apply much current to it because you have one string of really small batteries. So then you put a lot of strings in parallel, so you can increase the current you put and increase the overall power of the system. So that's where it gets really difficult with lithium-ion batteries because they really don't like to be overcharged or over discharged. When you're strings in parallel, you always take the risk that if one string is different than the other, it might get a lot more current, or it might get much higher voltage than the other just to compensate for the overall assembly. So most of the time, the control is at the single-cell level just to make sure that no cell goes into overcharge or over discharged. So it sounds like fixing a lithium battery at home isn't do not try this at home. I would absolutely not recommend putting battery together without a really good battery management system and a lot of sensors everywhere. I mean, battery packs are really expensive, and this is not just the cost of batteries. It's also the cost of all the voltage, current, temperature sensors, and what's called the battery management system that's going to take all that information and make sure everything stays safe. Yeah, I would not connect lithium batteries with just wires and call it a day. My electrical engineer friends hate when I say plug and play. And now I have a better understanding of that. Yeah, and the battery management system is still not great. The main difficulties to monitor was called state of charge. And that's pretty much knowing how much capacity you have left in your battery. That's extremely, extremely, extremely complicated. Because you cannot measure it directly. You have to use some indirect method to measure it. And those methods, they are really complex and they are pretty inaccurate. And I'm sure you notice that on your cell phone, where when it's old, you think you have 30% battery and the systems say you have 30%. And a few minutes later, you have 2% battery. The battery is fine. I mean, it's age, but it's fine. The problem is the monitoring of the state of charge. And on my cell phone, it's not a big deal. But if you look at cars, and there have been cases where some EVs got stranded because the car thought it still had 10 miles, whereas the battery was done. So understanding state of charge and monitoring it and recalibrating it to the age of a battery is extremely complicated. And that's because the battery degradation is going to change depending on how you use them. So if you take two battery packs, you put them in the field. They're going to degrade differently. So you cannot really pre-record what's going to happen for that battery. So a lot of our work in Chania is to try to find ways to diagnose the cells in the field and recalculate the state of charge. And we've been pretty successful in developing new methodologies to do that, as well as, in fact, we patented one last year or two years ago. Does some of the analysis include temperature? Or is it, I mean? Temperature is not really an issue for that. And that's because when the battery is at rest, usually it has to cool down. And the thermodynamic potential of a battery is dependent on temperature, but not by much around equilibrium. So that's usually not the biggest source of error. The battery getting out of sync, the way they degrade, is a much bigger contributor to the error. Are lithium batteries prone to degradation in super cold climates, like lead acid batteries are in cars? Or are they more resistant to that? I'm going to make a two-fold answer. Lithium ion batteries don't really like the cold. They're not going to degrade, but you're not going to get much capacity out of them. It's not degradation, because you should bring the battery back up. The temperature room, definitely. In terms of degradation, actually, no. They don't degrade at all. And as a matter of fact, and I know that's surprising for many people, battery degrades the most when you don't use them. So leaving a battery fully charged is going to lose a few percent of its capacity every year. And that's irreversible loss. That's not self-discharge. So parking a car that's parked 90% of the time, if you park it in the sun fully charged, that's really bad for your battery. And that's because of the chemical reaction inside. And actually, if you freeze your battery, that reaction is stopped. If you go in my lab, all my batteries that I'm not using, they're in a freezer. And that way, we slow that reaction as much as possible so that when we need to use it, the battery is still fresh. If we were leaving it on the shelf after a few years, we would have lost 10, 15% of the battery capacity. So actually keeping them cold is good for them, except that if they're really cold, they don't get the power out. But in terms of lifespan, it actually protects them. Exactly. Back in the day when you could remove the battery of your laptops, I was always doing that. I remove the battery, freeze it, vacuum seal it, and put it in the freezer. That's the best way to increase the life of your battery. What are some of the technologies coming on to get us to the next level of batteries? I mean, it seems like we're all looking forward to that perfect solution where batteries are lighter. They're more powerful. They last longer. They're more earth-friendly in terms of end of life. They're not hazmat and things like that. What are some of the things we can look forward to in the battery world? So again, it's going to be a multiple-fold answer. In terms of performance, batteries are getting 5% better roughly every year. And that's mostly through little tweaks here and there. We start putting a lot of silicone to replace some of the graphite. And that makes it a little bit better. But it's not going to be amazingly better. For that, we need to completely change the battery. And there are two candidates that people are most focused on. One is a lithium-air battery. And it's pretty much using air as an electrode, a little bit like in a fuel cell. So one side of the battery will be a fuel cell. The other side will be a lithium electrode. That could give a 10-fold increase, one of the magnitude increase in the capacity of the battery. But there's a lot of problems with that. The other candidate is a lithium-sulfur battery. So using sulfur can take a lot of lithium. So that could make, again, a battery with a one order of magnitude increase in terms of capacity. But we're still really far from being available commercially. We're still a lot of fundamental issues to solve to get there. And does that have a lot to do with the control issues you talked about? No, it's more fundamental material issue. The problem with the sulfur is that some compounds along the way when you put lithium on inside, some lithium compounds become soluble in the electrolyte. And so they leave the current collector. And it's impossible to have them come back. So you're using a lot of capacity that way. So it's not reversible. For the lithium-air, the problem is that you want your organic electrolyte for the lithium side. But that organic electrolyte is not stable against air. So how do you design your system so that you can have air come in against an electrolyte that's not stable? There are a lot of issues there. One solution that people working on is to replace that electrolyte by a solid electrolyte, electrolyte made of ceramics. That's really promising. But right now, those materials, they don't conduct ions quite fast enough. So they work decently at 100 degrees, 80 to 100 degrees. And there were some examples in France. Some of the EVs we had, and we still have, work with all-solid batteries where the electrolyte is a solid. But they ran 80 to 100 degrees. So it would work for EVs, for cell phones. It's not that much. So that's potential leads. That's going to make battery better in the future. I know one of the things that I've learned just playing with making hydrogen in the office and stuff is that surface area has a lot to do with how much hydrogen you can make or how much production you can get out of a battery. So when we get down to nano technology and one atom thick surfaces, if you can make them compatible, is that going to really help batteries? Well, most batteries already have some nano materials. The big problem we have with really small materials like that is that the battery degradation is mostly because that electrolyte is not stable. And so it passivates at the surface of the negative electron. So more surface means more passivation and means more degradation. So it's a balance to find between something that's more surface, you're going to get a lot of power, but you're going to see a lot of passivation. For energy batteries, usually you limit the surface. You want larger grains so that you have limited surface and you rely a lot on the diffusion of lithium through the materials. OK. Yeah, I didn't catch when I read your background that you have the ceramics background, but ceramics have always fascinated me. Well, in high school I did pottery. So it was fascinating just to learn about glazes and things. But then my wife has a friend who worked for NASA and had space shuttle tiles and things like that. And I'm just boggled by it. They're featherweight. You put them on the bottom of a space shuttle and absorbs all that heat, insulates it so that on one side it's thousands of degrees. The other side is temperature is cool enough to touch. I come from Limos, France, which is the term that's most famous in the world for the China plates, and the best China plates in the world come from that area. So we have the best European school on ceramics. And we do tiles, plates, all of that. But we also do all the advent ceramics. I mean, you don't realize in your cell phone all the capacitors, all of that, they are ceramics. In your TV there's a lot of ceramics. And the battery electrodes, they're both ceramics. So yeah, ceramics dictates a lot of things. And there are some amazing materials out there. So do you think that having that background in ceramics really helps you working with the machine? Yes, and in all the method we developed for two diagnosed commercial cells, we put a lot of material science into it. And it's the understanding of what the lithium does when it goes inside the materials that give us a lot of information of the state of the system. And by tracking those clues, we can diagnose the cell perfectly without having to open them. So that's a really novel method we implemented. We started working on about a decade ago, and now it's well-accepted all over the world. And it's highly recommended for people that testing battery to use that diagnosis method, because it gives you so much information without having to open the battery or do anything destructive to it. Wow. Well, believe it or not, we've blown through 30 minutes here, Matthew, and I got to admit, I learned a boatloading of information, Boku info, as we say, and at HGAP. So thanks very much for being here. I really appreciate it. We'll probably have to have you back sometime when it doesn't overexpose you and bring you back on Think Tech on Standard Energy Man. But thanks for being here. Your moment, welcome. Good pleasure. And for everyone else, we'll see you next week Friday in a brand new year. Standard Energy Man is signing off till 2019. Aloha.